Not Even Wrong
I recently saw a rather ignorant and twisted summary of Christianity from an atheist cartoon. It ended with this: “Eventually, the all-knowing man in the sky got fed up with the people doing things he knew they were going to do that would piss him off, so he takes his son and nails him to a cross, and says, ‘See? Now Look what you made me do. You should be ashamed of yourselves.’”
Kind of misses what really happened. Reminds me of something the physicist Wolfgang Pauli is quoted as saying. Rudolf Peierls writes that “a friend showed Pauli the paper of a young physicist which he suspected was not of great value but on which he wanted Pauli’s views. Pauli remarked sadly, ‘It is not even wrong.’” Generally speaking in science nowadays it is applied to pseudoscience, crackpot theories, and theories that cannot be falsified. I’m twisting it a bit here to mean that the statement or argument is so wrong that it’s hard to track back to where it went off into crazyland.
The cartoon kind of misses the whole point so badly that it’s hard to respond to; that is, one must track back and undo a bunch of odd preconceptions and then insert new ones. It would take a long time to correct all the wrong-headed notions.
So, here’s a short version. Jesus’ death was not designed to shame the human race. It was designed to rescue it. Jesus died for our sins and it was a voluntary act on his part, not forced on him by a vengeful Father. As an analogy to sort of explain it, think in terms of a soldier throwing himself on a grenade to save his buddies, or maybe a fireman who dies saving a family from a burning building.
The details of the crucifixion of Jesus are unpleasant: how he was beaten and humiliated, and finally nailed to a Roman cross to experience a slow and painful death. In fact, the cross was not even a Roman invention. They’d borrowed the idea from the Persians who had invented it as a means of killing criminals as slowly and as painfully as possible. Sometimes it could take nearly a week for a miscreant to finally reach room temperature.
The Romans, who adopted this execution method adopted it for the same reasons that the Persians had invented it: it was public, it was grueling, and it served as a useful warning to others who might think of getting out of line. The Romans believed crucifixion was a useful deterrent to future bad behavior, especially those who might be thinking of rebelling against Roman hegemony. Rebellious sorts were, the Romans believed, likely to think twice before they would take up arms against the Roman state when they saw the highways lined by the writhing bodies of their colleagues.
Jesus was executed by the Romans for the crime of rebellion: they saw him as a threat to civil order, as someone who might attempt to lead a Jewish revolt against Roman control.
Jesus’ disciples also initially saw his death as the end of the line: the smashing of their dreams that Jesus was the Messiah who would overthrow the Romans and re-establish the old Davidic monarchy. It was only Jesus’ resurrection three days later that began the process of forcing them to re-evaluate what they thought they knew about the Messiah and what it was that Jesus had actually been all about. Just as God had rescued the Israelites from physical slavery when Moses led them from Egypt, so now God had rescued them from spiritual slavery when Jesus died and rose again.
The problem with the cartoon summary of Christianity by the atheist is that it misses both the motivation of the actors and the outcome of the story (among other things; missing the resurrection is a serious flaw). Just as a flatearther is woefully ignorant of science, so this atheist is woefully ignorant of Christianity and the Bible.
